The lastest Home Shop Machinist has an article by Mathew Evans. He has written some code which after having data entered, writes G-code to do as instructed. I understood it would be on the website, but I have not found it. Anyone know where to find it?

Grant

Neil

05-17-2006, 09:16 AM

A web search for "GCG Matthew Evans" will bring up the link to version 2.0 of his program. I haven't seen his version 2.4 yet.

Neil

Swarf North

05-18-2006, 02:10 AM

Thanks, Neal. I tried that before I posted here, without success. But I got it now. I think the article spells his name with one "t", but it took two "tt"s to find it. DOH:rolleyes:

Grant

John Stevenson

05-18-2006, 04:51 AM

There have been many of these small programs designed to take the hassle of of small repetitious tasks.

Commercially they are part of a CNC controller and called Conversational Programming. Mach 3 has these internally called Wizards which are the same thing.

However that's assuming you are running this particular piece of software although you can always cut and paste.

Some while ago a guy called Mark Thomas started to write a windows based conversational program that would allow you to feed in numbers, generate code and get a file to use on your machine regardless of controller.

He called this program GenGCode and there was a yahoo group for beta testers.
It made it up to V4 with virtually all the bugs ripped out and then he lost interest never to be heard of again.

The program is still up on his web site.

http://home.inter.net/mthomas/Download.htm and it still works but I have no idea for how much longer so it's worth grabbing now.

The ZIP file is password protected but Mark freely gave this out and it was on the Yahoo site so I have no problems about publishing it here, the password is aardvark in lower case.

Once installed you get a menu up of 9 options, three of which don't work as they were never completed, drill points, panel and text but all the rest work.

You can build jobs up by appending to existing files and you also can have you own start and end commands to suit your machine.

All in all it was a nice piece of work and a pity it didn't go further.
It's also go for the manual guys who want way points for use on mills with DRO's, really saves time if you don't have things like bolt circles inside your DRO.

No know bugs that can ruin a job, biggest on is repeating a start move but as you are already there it's only the east of a couple of lines of code.

Evan

05-18-2006, 09:32 AM

While poking around on the net I found his program recently. He still answers his e-mails and sent me the password. I also noted that you were mentioned in respect of the program John. The program is incomplete but the bolt circle portion seems to be handy. I haven't actually tried it for generating code yet but it looks worth having.

John Stevenson

05-18-2006, 11:06 AM

Interesting Evan,
I emailed him via the Yahoo group and also email possibly just under a year ago and got no replies.
Yes the program is incomplete, some parts wanting to be put in and others want tidying but it's workable on what's there.
The bolt circle program has no way to call the tool up so I just used to run a pre code that called tool 1 and switched the spindle on, then went back and manually edited it for tool number and speed.

I got involved quite early in the program doing beta testing and I still use it for odd jobs to save head scratching.

.

motorworks

05-18-2006, 04:30 PM

Here is a link to a program page that generates code
Find it ok for the lathe
e
link:
http://www.ohmikron.com/index.php